Witness for the Transit

Raised in Fort Lee, N.J., long based in San Francisco and drawn by wanderlust or employment to Montreal, Lisbon, Auckland, Austin, Dubai and Berlin, August Kleinzahler is as much a travel writer as he is a poet: his sometimes bitter, sometimes astonished poems (several even entitled “Traveler’s Tales”) seek the distinctive qualities of each place, repellent or beautiful or (in places he loves best) both at once. In Vancouver, “the neon mermaid over the fish place / looks best that way, in the rain.” At Coney Island, “a cluster of hip-hop Lubavitch punks” watch Neil Diamond (yes, it’s really him) amble past on the sand; in the American South, the poet imagines “pecans suffering /their convoluted slumber in the heat.” The poet’s interest in places spans the globe now, but it began with his native New Jersey, where (an early poem called “Poetics” says) “I have loved the air outside Shop-Rite Liquor / on summer evenings/ better than the Marin hills at dusk.” Few poets since William Carlos Williams have done more for the Garden State, or rendered with such mixed feelings what they saw there.

North Jersey also gives Kleinzahler his other great subject: American masculinity, the qualities we attribute to tough guys and men. Kleinzahler’s sole book of prose, “Cutty, One Rock,” begins and ends in the Fort Lee of his youth, a gruff, if upscale, Mafia stronghold. “Boys are formed by the playgrounds they come from,” he wrote there. “Ours was violent, noisy and profane.” That book ends with a memoir of the poet’s adored older brother, “a tough guy, a jock,” a “hard-living, hard-loving, haunted, hounded kid” who killed himself in the early 1970s. The poems (unlike the prose) rarely discuss masculinity outright: instead, they take on, and render aesthetically interesting, the qualities that tough guys are supposed to have. They can be, for example, caustic, even sarcastic; interested in baseball, in airplanes, in old-fashioned bars; attracted to sharp, rough or grating textures and sounds; and unlikely to examine in detail the reasons behind their emotions. Instead, especially if they name those emotions, they turn laconic and stop short.

Laconic guys (as in the early Hemingway) may be trying not to lie, or trying not to let themselves believe lies. Kleinzahler organizes many poems by simple accretion, detail following detail, as if any argument or story would imply an attempt to deceive: he therefore makes most points through juxtapositions. The title poem depicts “Cretaceous pink sandstone,” “the Black Hills School of Beauty” and the “campaign headquarters of one Jack Billion” (a real person, now the head of South Dakota’s Democratic Party). The same block that holds “the exact center of the Oglala known universe” contains the incongruously opulent hotel where the poet wakes up to a freight train “rattling through this sleeping town.” “Here, at the exact dead center of America,” white tourists can admire the landscapes sacred to the same Indians their ancestors killed. One topic here is American (male) hypocrisy, but the other (set against the sandstone’s permanence) is the traveling poet’s transience: he cannot belong to this “sacred place,” cannot find more than temporary “surcease here from all my cares.”

Kleinzahler’s poems stumble and lope with a technique on the far side of fluency, one that can no more be approximated by naïve writers than a beginner can play fluent free jazz. Most pages use long lines along with an intricate syntax, diving into metrical regularity for just a phrase or two: when Kleinzahler asks himself, in a poem about dreams, “who were they all in your sleep last night?” the triple rhythm renders ironic the quiet “big room” where he wakes up alone. Kleinzahler sometimes deploys another kind of line, always end-stopped and nearly unpunctuated, whose slow progress mimics perception itself: “There goes another plane / Its engines reverberating in the clouds / Now sirens too / Very like the sirens we heard only yesterday.” Unpromising subjects, apparently ugly scenes, attract Kleinzahler in part thanks to his temperament, so averse to conventional prettiness, and in part because they offer a challenge: “two snails” crawling along “the inside of a Granny Goose / Hawaiian-style potato chips,” “cool among shadows and cellophane,” require all his skills before we, too, can find them interesting. Though the poems offer easy visual analogies — to Ashcan School scenes, say, or film noir establishing shots — they also compare themselves to music. Kleinzahler worked for years as a record reviewer; his eclectic tastes let him bring into his poems show tunes, Mozart, jazz from Dixieland to Mingus and Monk, even a gamelan orchestra, whose “shimmering arabesques ... ring in the treble as though beaten out / on a thousand wee anvils, xylophones clicking like hail.”

Like all selected-and-new volumes, this one shows continuities along with the ways in which the poet has changed. Kleinzahler’s first alter egos were derelicts: “Jimmy the Lush,” and a drunk named Johnny who wandered through Montreal “burning off all the stillborn Johnnys / that hatched in his head in the night.” Now his doppelgängers are weary professionals: frequent fliers who stay “at the Hotel Oblivion” and say to themselves, “I cannot yet recall what city this is”; a great architect; and a “famous travel writer” with no “home / except that of airports / and a perpetual predawn realm.” Kleinzahler never speaks from a height, much less from a lectern. On the other hand he is no populist and never pretends to know less than he does. He seems, instead, to write the poems that he wants to read. Those poems describe aversions and attractions, things discovered and overheard, friends met in adulthood and, on rare occasions, the poet’s own youth, served up with a compression that approximates (but never becomes) self-mockery: “What a lot of erections, voidings, pretzels, / bouncing the ball against the stoop. / She really did love you, all along.”

Kleinzahler’s first books (published in the 1970s in Canada) started and ended in melancholy solitude: one compact poem began with the word “Loneliness,” another recorded “sadness coming on in waves.” The poet seems happier now. He has written about sex, and about difficult breakups, since his 20s, but only now can he write well about romantic love. The wonderfully counterintuitive “Anniversary” finds an emblem of marriage in a hawk whose cry (“kee-eeee-arrr, kee-eeee-arrr, / a harsh, descending sound”) seems threatening, even “terrible,” to human ears, yet summons, for the hawk, the companion it seeks: “off they flew ... / enraptured by all they were, were able to do, / not as separate beings, but as two.” The tough poet, like the hawk, has found — however unlikely — a suitable mate.

Kleinzahler’s poems of guyhood, like his poems of travel (they are often the same poems), make fun of the very qualities they admire: when they praise Shop-Rite Liquor, or envy the raw sex drive of a tomcat “grooving to a limbic tomtom,” they are kidding and they are not kidding at once. Many poets try to sound tough, or masculine, or self-conscious about manhood, and fail miserably: what qualities let Kleinzahler succeed? His eye, and his ear — he is, first and last, a craftsman, a maker of lines — but also his range of tones, and his self-restraint: he never says more than he should, rarely repeats himself and keeps his focus not on the man who speaks the poems (and whose personality comes across anyway) but on what that man sees and on what he can hear.

SLEEPING IT OFF IN RAPID CITY

Poems, New and Selected.

By August Kleinzahler.

234 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $26.

Stephen Burt teaches at Harvard. His new book of criticism is “The Forms of Youth.”

A version of this review appears in print on , on page BR15 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Witness for the Transit. Today's Paper|Subscribe